too, in the warmth of the old iron range, bouncing baby Blanche on her knee. Her father and brother would step through the door, back from delivering the last few sacks of flour to the local shops and bakeries, and her father would scoop up Blanche and swing her round, making her chortle and clap her chubby hands together.
Mireille swallowed the lump of homesickness that had hardened in her throat at this image. How she missed them all. She would have given anything to be there in the kitchen, sharing a frugal meal richly seasoned with love. And afterwards, lying in her bed in the room that she and Eliane shared, they would exchange whispered secrets. How she longed to have someone to confide in.
But that was a luxury that she couldn’t afford. She forced herself to set aside her thoughts of home and focus instead on her instructions for tonight’s task.
Under cover of the Christmas Eve revelries, which would hopefully be providing a welcome distraction to those soldiers unfortunate enough to have been assigned guard duties over the festive period, Madame Arnaud explained that Mireille was to accompany a man to the Pont de Sèvres, where they would be met by Christiane, a passeuse with whom Mireille had worked before, and she would take him to the next safe house along the route.
‘But you will need to work fast tonight, Mireille,’ Madame Arnaud cautioned. ‘The Métro will be crowded, with few trains running, and you must rendezvous with Christiane in time to get yourself back home before the curfew. Even at Christmas, it would not be wise to be picked up by the Germans.’
Mireille nodded. She understood the risks all too well. She had been warned that if she was picked up and questioned, she should try not to divulge any information for the first twenty-four hours to give the others in the network time to cover their tracks and disperse. But she was also aware of some of the torture methods that the Nazis employed to try to get that information out of any suspected members of the Resistance and an unspoken fear was lodged deep within her. If it came to it, would she have the strength to endure such treatment?
None of that bore thinking about right now, though; she needed to concentrate fully on the task in hand. Even the slightest fear or distraction might give them away or mean that she forgot to keep up her guard at some crucial moment. One never knew what would be encountered en route to get her ‘friend’ safely to his destination.
‘Level of French?’ she asked Madame Arnaud, referring to the stranger for whom she was about to risk her life.
Madame Arnaud shook her head. ‘Almost none, and an accent so terrible it would give him away in an instant. One further complication – he’s injured his foot. So you’ll need to give him some support if you have to walk any distance.’
A bad landing during a parachute jump, perhaps, Mireille thought. This wouldn’t be the first foreign airman she had helped to escape. Or maybe this man had just had a long, terrifying journey fleeing in fear of his life because of his religion. Or his politics. Or simply because of some petty feud with a neighbour which had led to a bitter denunciation. Who knew? She didn’t ask, because if she happened to be caught then the less she knew, the better.
The man appeared from a room towards the back of the house, dressed in a thick overcoat. He was limping and Monsieur Arnaud, who followed him, reached out a helping hand to support the man’s elbow as he came down the two steps from the hallway to the entrance where Mireille stood waiting. The man’s skin had a greyish tinge and, although he tried to hide it, she saw that he winced in pain as he stepped down on to his injured foot. Monsieur Arnaud handed him a homburg hat. And Mireille couldn’t help noticing that the hat was grey and that it had a green band, just like the one worn by the man who had dropped off the newspaper on what had felt like her first proper assignment, that day when she’d first met Monsieur Leroux.
‘Come,’ she whispered in English. ‘We must be going.’
The man nodded and then turned to Madame Arnaud, clasping both her hands in his. ‘Merci, madam, a thousand thanks, you are so very gentille . . .’ He stumbled over